JRSteele

I have tried a lot of headsets working from home. Bluetooth ones constantly fight with walls and interference. The WH64 uses DECT, which is a completely different story. I can walk half a block from my house with buildings and obstructions in between and it still transmits clearly. The noise cancelling mic is exceptional: background noise that would normally bleed into calls just disappears. Muting is simple too. Push the red button on the boom or raise the boom almost vertical. Everyone who works remotely should have one of these.

I know what you are thinking: my laptop already has a webcam. Here is why that one is not good enough.

Laptop webcams are sometimes placed near the bottom of the screen, which means people on calls are looking up your nose. If you have a multi-monitor setup, your laptop screen is probably off to the side — so during calls you are either cranking your neck to face the camera (often just a tiny unmarked pinhole that blends right into the bezel), angling your screen to get your face in the right position which makes it difficult to read and messes with your setup, or giving everyone a view of the side of your face.

The C920e sits on top of your main display. Eye level, centered, easy to reposition. Need to show something physical in a meeting? Pick up the webcam and point it. Picking up and swinging a laptop around is cumbersome and awkward. And if your setup does not use your laptop display at all, you can keep it closed — you do not need it open for the webcam.

The built-in mic is also significantly better than what most laptops ship with. And it comes with a privacy cover — so if you accidentally turn your camera on when you did not mean to, it is not a big deal.

One more use case worth mentioning: online proctored certification exams through services like Pearson VUE OnVue require you to show your workspace and entire room before starting. A flexible external webcam makes that process far less painful. I used this exact setup for both my AWS Certified Solutions Architect and AWS Certified Developer exams.

I work from home and my income depends on a reliable internet connection. My main provider is CenturyLink fiber: gig speeds, handles every device in the house including heavy streaming with no issues. But in my area the fiber lines get cut by construction crews at least once or twice a year, and when they go down the entire area goes with them. Outages can last up to 24 hours and there is nowhere nearby to work around it.

My backup is a mobile Starlink plan. Slower than fiber but solid enough for meetings and work. The ER605 ties it all together: by default everything routes through CenturyLink. If CenturyLink goes down it automatically fails over to Starlink. I don't have to do anything.

A few hundred dollars in equipment and $50 a month to protect a six figure income is one of the easiest cost-benefit decisions I have ever made. I am a firm believer in contingency planning. If you work from home and your livelihood depends on connectivity, you need a redundancy plan. This router makes it simple.